Kim Jung Un’s speech singing the praises of militarism reminded us how real wars—rather than martial excitement—tend to generate second thoughts. We were recently reading some British poetry from World War I. Honestly, it was a mixed bag from an aesthetic point of view. But a line from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about “children ardent for some desperate glory” had some obvious applicability to the Dear Respected Kim Jong Un. We were reminded that for every chestnut like John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields”–which uses death to stir patriotism and new recruits—there were an equal number of more somber reflections on war from those who actually experienced it. I am sure Kim Jong Un would see the following as bourgeois sentimentalism; so be it. He might want to read them more than once.

Charles Hamilton Sorley, “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead”